State of Podcasting and How to Start One with Ernest Barbaric

Quick Wins interview with Ernest Barbaric, a seasoned consultant, digital marketer, and veteran podcaster. Ernest shares his career journey, how he adapted through volatile market swings, and how he got started with podcasting. Ernest shares perspectives on the state of podcasting as channel, common pitfalls, and what to consider if you want to start your own podcast show.

Ernest also discusses the upcoming PodSummit, a one day event in Western Canada where you will get a chance to connect with podcasters, businesses, hobbyists, entrepreneurs, community leaders, and content creators sharing their voice with the world.

Listen to the Episode Here:

We’re going to be doing a Quick Wins interview. Quick Wins is when I have the opportunity to connect with individuals discussing ideas, products, and services to help round out your consulting tool kit. I’m honored to have Ernest Barbaric join us. He is a seasoned consultant. He’s specifically in the digital marketing space. He’s also a podcaster and an all-around go-getter himself. I had the chance to meet Ernest when I attended his PodSummit conference. He had hosted the first PodSummit conference within the western Canada area and I was super thrilled to meet him. With his help and with this conference, it’s the founding story of the MECE Muse Unplugged. I’m excited to have Ernest on this show. Ernest shares with us how he got started in consulting, specifically how we adapted after a lot of different volatile market shifts because he did several stints with startups. He also helps discuss and dissect more about how he became a podcaster. He’s got a cool podcast called The Art of Meaningful Work. He became an early adopter of podcasting in general. He’s been podcasting for a number of years. On this show, he breaks down the state of podcasting. If you’re interested in starting your own podcast show, what are some of things you should consider?

Interview with Ernest Barbaric

There are a lot of noise in the system. Podcasting is the thing to do these days. With Ernest’s insights and he’s been at the ground floor of podcasting as a channel, he provides some profound insight. I attended his PodSummit and after attending that summit, I ended up launching the MECE Muse Unplugged. I felt like I walked away and had a whole tool kit of information I needed to start my own show. I’m looking forward to participating in his PodSummit again. This time as a podcaster and being able to get some advanced information. What’s cool is that he sets up the conference, so whether you were just getting started like I was or if you’re a seasoned podcaster looking to take your podcast show to the next game, his summit fits all areas. Ernest, thank you so much for joining us on MECE Muse. How are you doing?

I am excellent and this is such a pleasure. I enjoy our friendship and I’m glad that we’re able to connect on a podcast.

Ernest is the reason this podcast even exists. We met online. I was looking for a hack to start a podcast show. I remember I came across your summit. I’m based in Boston and on a whim, I was like, “I’m attending the summit. This looks like the real deal.” Then I reached out to you. It’s such a pleasure to have you and this go full circle. Maybe you can take a moment and you can introduce yourself to the go getters of the MECE Muse Unplugged.

Hello, Go-Getters of the MECE Muse Unplugged. Most of the work that I do is in the digital marketing strategy world. I do consulting for a pretty wide variety of different brands. I have done some work with insurance companies, automotive companies, non-profits, large national, and international brands on digital marketing strategy. That’s where most of my daily work comes into play. What I am all about is something that I’ve started discovering over the last couple of years and that’s about doing meaningful work, which is one of the major topics that I talk about on my own podcast. It’s something that I write about and it’s something that I’m going to be leaning into more and more and hopefully years to come after. It’s around talking to people that are driven, ambitious professionals that want to make change in the world and working with them on executive coaching, on giving them the resources and the tribe of people to help them make that happen.

I’m all about meaningful work as well. Maybe that’s how we ended up being able to connect. We would love to hear a little bit of how you got into digital marketing work and consulting work and then maybe share the story of how you started your podcast, The Art of Meaningful Work.

I finished school for Electronics Engineering and in my mind, I want to build robots when I grow up. I graduated right around the time that the first dot-com crash happened and so there was no work for any of us. I finished Electronics Engineering and then what ended up being my first job was mixing this rubber compound and pouring it into these plastic axel cups that essentially was a piece of electronics that would go on top of a locomotive axle to measure the speed. If somebody equated this way, it was like he was training to become a doctor and then working as a janitor at a hospital.

That was my first entry into the working world. That company got bought and sold. We all got laid off. Then I got another job, then that company got bought and sold and we all got laid off. Then I was like, “I’ve had enough of this.” I decided to make a transition into sales and marketing. Where I started getting into digital marketing was right around the time where I was still in school. Parallel to this, the electronics engineering career that I had, that was fairly short lived. I was building websites. There was a group of us that built a motorcycle forum. One of the first ones at this part of North America, and out of the four of us, I ended up somehow becoming the one that would help us build promotions.

We got group eyes on tires and all sorts of different things that motorcycle riders need. We started selling banner ads and I would design themselves. I was doing all these different things before they were a thing. When I finally transitioned out of electronics, those skills that I’ve been building for the last three or four years all came in handy when I made the transition into marketing. I figured out that sales weren’t necessarily the best direction for me. I ended up getting my first job in the marketing field and I got recruited to work for a radio station cluster. When I showed them what I was doing with banner ads and all that stuff four years ago, they were salivating at their mouth to get me to build this for their cluster. We did and we got a great amount of success with that and then I got canned from there and then I started my own company. That was in 2007 or 2008 when I started my company and then I went on to build an agency and then I realized that I didn’t like being responsible for another people’s work. I had a couple of people hired and then we would send out stuff for clients that I was getting. At that time, it was website work.

I remember this one specific time, where I was about to send in the website to a client and I looked at the code and it was in Dutch and I’m like, “What the hell is this?” What’s happening is the designer that was working with it at the time was basically cobbling codes together from different things. It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t good, and that’s when I made the decision. I didn’t want to be responsible for that. I scaled back to just me and it’s been just me for the last nine years. It went from an agency to a social media marketing consultancy and then into a digital marketing consultancy in the Internet digital marketing strategy consultancy, which is what I’ve been doing for the last five or six years or so. During that time, I created a social media for business certification program at our university. I’ve created digital marketing for business certification. I worked with the Canadian Marketing Association. I created two certificates for them. I was one of the first early movers in this, and I’ve been steeped in this for long enough to be one of the old guys in the field. I’ve created a lot of these different certification programs for universities and associations. That brings us up to now, in terms of the work that I’ve been doing on a consulting basis.

It reminds me of that period of time in history. There was a lot of turmoil in the marketplace. If you recall the dot-com boom, then the dot-com bust and it sounds like you were riding that wave.

I got caught up in the wake of that wave. Here’s the interesting thing. The people that were going to my program at my school six months before I graduated were getting recruited to go to San Diego and they were getting a signing bonus, a car, a surfboard, and a condo. I’m like, “This is going to be awesome.” When I graduated a couple of months before that, the complete decimation of all of those kinds of industries happened. There was no work in the field anymore and that was a blessing in disguise. That gave me an understanding of the industry that wasn’t the best fit for me. When I started my business, it was the 2008 crash too. Think about crashes, it seems to be a common theme in the way that my work has evolved.

It goes to show your agility as well and your ability to adapt regardless.

When that happened the first few times, I’d never thought about it. Now that I’m more aware, I think about it more. At the same time, now that I am more aware of it, there is a little bit more fear perhaps, which creates a different mindset where you are aware of the opportunities, where you are aware of the downfalls. At those times that I was first getting started, I was younger, and I didn’t care. It didn’t matter and it just worked. There is a certain advantage to that naivety as well, that I know that I’m all jaded and old and grizzled and stuff that I don’t have anymore.

How did you make the pivot into podcasting? Is it during one of those downturns?

The first podcast was around marketing. That was around maybe 2010 or so. I started doing it just as an exercise of a cool medium. I love gear, I love microphones and I’m like, “Let’s make something happen.” I ended up doing that with a friend of mine and then we fizzled out after probably about ten or twelve episodes or so. At the time, there wasn’t as much choice as there is now. One of my very good friends found out about me through the podcast. She invited me to do some consulting for her company and then we’ve been friends ever since. Me and her do projects together. The way that we met was through the podcast. There were definitely some interesting things that happened and it also helped position me as a bit of a leader at that time. Since that, I’ve started and crashed about six different podcasts. The current generation of the current podcast is a completely different world than where I started.

Tell us a little bit about why you love podcasting? Apparently, if you’ve started and stopped several different types. What keeps you going with this as a medium, as a consultant?

I have to put a couple of different lenses on it. In the sense of using podcasting as a medium to promote yourself as a thought leader or perhaps as a brand that works in a particular space. What podcasting allows you to do, and right now things might be a little bit different, we’re going through a bit of a shift, is it allows you to connect with people intimately one-on-one. If you think about it, when you listen to podcasts, I used to go on runs, walks or something else like that. It gives me the ability to listen to whoever is talking to me through a microphone and it’s an intimate relationship. It’s like I’m having a conversation with that person that’s telling me stuff. Specifically, for me, it was around entrepreneurship, marketing, digital marketing and those kinds of things. That’s where the advantage to podcasting is. The way that I’ve always looked at it. This is the way that has always driven everything that I do in terms of content creation, how I build courses, how I create articles, podcasts, videos, everything.

State Of Podcasting: What podcasting allows you to do is it allows you to connect with people intimately one-on-one.

I always think about what is something that I can do and create that will help someone do whatever it is that they’re doing. For me, that happened to be around marketing at the very beginning. I was looking at it as a teaching media. These are the things that I know and if you listen to this podcast, you will learn them, and you will be a better marketer or a better leader, a better professional. That’s an important distinction. The second part that I’m going to add to that is the podcast that I have right now, there was a significant shift that happened in my entire trajectory of my life and work and everything else after my mom passed away. That was in 2012. I’ve always had it in the back of my mind and I’ve gone through a lot of different transitions.

When I first got into consulting and building my own business, I was chasing after money and I reached some of those goals and I’ve realized that that wasn’t what made me happy. I’ve come to the realization that it wasn’t the money, it was the time that was important to me. When my mom passed away, it gives you a hard understanding of the finality of time that we have. When something like that happens, once that kind of trauma happens, that’s when you make a transition into start thinking differently. The next project that came out of that is I ended up coming across an article by Sir Ray Avery and TechCrunch. Sir Ray Avery is a New Zealander and mentor. He’s an incredible person. Most people have no idea who he is.

He’s done some incredible work. A couple of the projects that he’s done is one of them was a cataract surgery that you’re able to run in internal countries and that helps a lot of people get their vision and sight back. Another one was he built this incubator that could work in brownout conditions, so in countries that had unstable power supplies and then he used this technology and commercialize that. He would run these projects in countries that needed that. One of the things that he did, it is on average in North America or in the Western civilization, you have about 81 years of life in total. Based on that, that gives you about 30,000 days of life in total. Based on that, he would then allocate what he’s going to dedicate his time to as those days trickled down. I read that about maybe less than a year after my mom passed away and that hit me at the right time.

I did a calculation and for me it came out to be 26,000 days of total based on my family history. The podcast that I started then was called 26K and that’s where that number comes from. What I decided to do is, I would interview people who I found inspiring and who I’ve found we’re doing something of worth, who had fulfilling lives, who felt great about what they did, and they made a contribution. I started intrigued them to figure out, “How can I do that? Is there a way for me to transition from being lost essentially to doing something of worth and doing something of meaning?” After that, the next iteration of that was The Art of Meaningful Work, which is a podcast I’m doing right now.

You mentioned your mom and I empathize completely. My mom passed away in 2009 and I always tell people that my life is splintered. There was life before she passed away and then there’s life after because it’s just never been the same. My condolences for sure.

For me, it happened in 2012. It has been a number of years since then, but that was one of those transformational experiences. The people that I was interviewing were entrepreneurs, authors, leaders of companies that are doing good work, people that have tiny little companies that are doing interesting things. I started extracting what are some of the common themes when it comes to meaningful work. One very common thing that I’ve found is that there’s usually what I called a moment of truth. Something that comes and hits you and you can go a couple of different directions. One is time is finite. That’s a moment of truth for me. You have two choices. One, do whatever it is that you’ve been doing so far or two, change and chart a new direction. Something that gives your life meaning, makes you feel fulfilled so that when you’re on your deathbed you don’t have regrets about things that you should have or could have done. That was a common thread with most people that are doing meaningful work. They face that moment of truth and that’s what I found across, you and I included.

I couldn’t agree more. I don’t think I would’ve created this space to have a podcast or to write a book or any of the things that I’m doing today if it wasn’t for that trajectory that I was shifted into. I want to pivot a bit and talk a little bit more about just podcasting. It feels like, Ernest, the market is saturated, everyone has a podcast. It has become the new business card and that’s how it feels to me. Maybe because I’m in the world, but you’ve been in the beginning of podcasting. You’ve gone through the journey. You’ve been in the game for a while. Where do you see this medium had it? if a go getter is listening to this and they’ve been thinking about starting a podcast, is it worth it?

Is it worth it? Yes, but I’m going to add a couple of caveats. What’s happening is some people are calling it a renaissance of podcasting or golden age of podcasting or whatever. There was an interesting thing that happened and that is the popularity of podcasting has grown substantially. It was due to show such as Serial, which was one of the big hitters out of that whole bunch of other things came out. What’s happening right now is that we have a lot of entries into the field. There is a lot more competition than there ever was. There are a lot more podcasts than there ever was, not just in North America, but all over the world. Is it worth it? I would say yes with a couple of caveats.

One of the most important things that we’re going to see is that since there’s this big saturation right now, everybody’s coming into the space, in about a year or two, you’re going to have a big drop off. It might be steep, but it is going to be a drop off, and essentially, the people that are going to drop off and the companies are going to drop off are the ones that got into it for a quick ROI. The ones that said, “We’re going to start a podcast. We’ll record ten episodes and then we’ll make millions of dollars.” It doesn’t work like that. The people that are going to remain are the ones that have something bigger than the podcast. Why are you doing this? For me, a podcast just happens to be a way to express that idea of meaningful work. It could be a blog, it could be a get together, it could be a retreat.

Podcast is just one of the ways to do that. If I was using it just as to promote myself, then that may not have longevity. That’s one thing and you’re going to see a lot of those companies that got into and be like, “This is a popular thing right now, so let’s do it.” A year down the road, we produce ten or fifteen episodes and we didn’t see a magical lift in our revenue. That wasn’t worth it, so let’s go into Facebook ads or Twitter ads or whatever it happens to be at the time. That’s one thing. The key thing is that you have to know why you’re doing it. Is it a good match for your audience? Also, what is the greater why that you are contributing to with a podcast?

Finally, out of that will come consistency, because people that stick with it that continually improve, that make it a better experience for their listeners, making sure that the listeners are getting something valuable out of their time together because you’re taking twenty or 30 minutes from someone. What are they getting out of it? You have to be very clear on the value that you give to that person on a consistent basis. Those people that have that kind of thinking are going to be able to sustain an edge in podcasting anyways.

I read somewhere that the average podcast has no more than fifteen or twenty episodes. Is that still the case or has that number average gone up a bit?

I think that the average is right around there. You’ll see a lot of fizzling out around and I see about a twenty-episode mark is when you have something to say. Here’s the thing. You have something to say, you say it in the first twenty episodes, but then what? You interviewed those first twenty people and then what? That’s the differentiation between, “This was something that I can sustain for a couple years,” or “This is something that’s going to be part of my brand moving forward.” I’m going to add one more thing. Your audience may be familiar with Seth Godin’s Startup School podcast series that he created a couple of years ago. That was a lecture series that was published in the podcast format and it’s still one of the most popular podcasts there is and there’s been no additions to it for two or three years. If you think about things that way, it’s something that’s going to be a self-contained project, not necessarily something that you’ll have to sustain over time. That’s totally fine too. You can tweak it to however, whatever works for you at the time.

One of the things that helped me get over the fear of starting a podcast, and I’m sure the audience may be in that same space, is that, I had something to say, but a part of me was like, “Why would I be able to sustain it? Can I make that type of commitment?” The second thing is, “Am I going to run out of things to say or am I going to run out of gas to interview?” That was a true fear and as I’ve spoken to people that don’t have podcasts but are interested, that’s usually the fear they have. Now that I’m on the other side, it’s interesting. In my 40th plus episode now. I have way more gas. I have too much to talk about. Sometimes I feel like I should increase my frequency. If you’re on the other side of that and if you’re a struggling artist, what would be some advice you would give someone that it’s like, do I have enough to say? Can I find enough guest? Can I make it sustainable?

You can look at it in a couple of different ways. One is to have a bit of a content strategy or content plan. What I do in my digital marketing strategy work is we come up with a content strategy for clients. I had a meeting with a nonprofit organization that wants to launch a podcast. We’re down with equipment, which is what they wanted to find out, but we ended up talking about the themes. If you could pick two words that you want people to associate with your brand, what two words would those be? Then use those two words as your through line of all the content that you produce. For example, if it happens to be innovation and accounting, that gives you two concrete topic buckets that you can create around.

You can talk about innovation, you can talk about accounting practices, changes in tax law, innovation and accounting. For example, software, AI, it gives you a ton of different ideas and topics that you could go around those two. The other thing that I was going to say is if you’re going to have enough guests. What I mentioned is more of a proactive approach. This is how I want to promote myself. The other way to look at it is, “What do I want to learn?” The way that I’ve looked at it is the people that I interview and have interviewed, I want to learn from them. What has your life experience been like? What are the transition points that you’ve gone through? What advice would you give to yourself as you were 30 years younger? With different people that I interview, I personally have always gotten something out of it and if I could share that with my audience, maybe they’ll get something as well.

State Of Podcasting: The people that I interview and have interviewed, I want to learn from them.

You can almost look at it as a selfish project where I’m going to reach out to people to learn from them and then I get to implement that, and I also get to share that journey with my listeners. Those are two different approaches. One is I want to position myself by using these two words as a theme bucket essentially, or I want to learn from people who I find inspiring and then share that with my listeners. Both of those are going to be valuable, depending on how you decide to go.

You’ve been podcasting for some time, Ernest. What would be something that you wish you had known when you first started podcasting that you share with people?

One of the biggest lessons for me is consistency. Even now, for example, 26K, the podcast that I had before this one, I remembered that I was getting between 3,000 to 4,000 downloads per episode and then I fizzled out and then I put out another episode and then that one got 500 downloads and that crushed me. Because that crushed me, I didn’t put another episode for another month and I put another episode and then I got 50 downloads and I was like, “I’m done with this.” It’s not working and it sucked all the drive and motivation on me. If I would have kept consistent, that podcast would probably now be getting tens of thousands of downloads per episode because that was the trajectory that it was on. Consistency is a key lesson that I still haven’t internalized because even with my current podcast, there’s still a month, sometimes two-month gaps in between episodes. I’m going through this transition period. I’m trying to figure out how that plays into everything else that I do. Once I figured that out, I’m going to have a bit more of a solid content marketing plan for the podcast in everything else I do. Consistency is one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned over the years. If you get into it, publish it, stick to any publishing schedule that you have, once every two weeks, once a week, whatever it is, just stick to it.

A lot of people felt that pain you were talking about in the latter part of 2017, when Apple changed their algorithms. Everyone I knew, their numbers plummeted. There were people out there that was depressed, so this is good.

Here’s where that comes into play and this is something to think about. If you were to be a subscriber to a magazine, let’s say Inc. or Entrepreneur, and let’s say you get that magazine once a month, you’re not always going to read all of the articles. You can think about that for your podcast as well. You’re going to publish. Sometimes it’ll vibe with people and sometimes it won’t, but the thing is you have a lot of silent listeners or silent readers that may not say or do anything. Maybe they don’t download your podcasts, but they can see it’s coming up on their feed, but then when something is interesting, they’ll download it, but they have subscribed. There are all of those nuances as well where just maintaining that relationship with your listeners allows you to maintain the relationship and perhaps grow it and maybe they’ll recommend it to someone else.

The download numbers can be a bit of a misleading metric sometimes. I’ll tell you something from my video experiment. I have a ridiculous amount of equipment for all sorts of different things. I started producing videos for our company that I resurrected out of the ashes and they’re around digital marketing strategy. I produced three videos. On YouTube, one has 80 views, one has maybe 60, and the other one has 107. When I would look at that, that would seem very low and might seem like, “What’s the point?” Out of one of those videos, I had an excellent opportunity to do some consulting for a large brand and the marketing director saw the video. They thought it was interesting. They thought it was compelling, which led them to my website, which then led into a contract. It isn’t necessarily just a numbers game. You always want to think about, “What is the purpose behind me doing this?” For me, it was around providing value that person finds it valuable, which then led into a contract afterwards.

It’s not always about the numbers and sometimes, in the social media world we live in, it feels like that’s the magic. It’s the number of followers, number of likes, number of downloads, but it’s not always that to your point. It just took that one person to hear the right one person, it’s not a hundred right people. That’s a good lesson.

100 would be great, but one right person, that was totally worth it. If you think about it that way as well, the relationships that I was able to create as a result of someone listening to my podcast have been incredible. I’ll give you another example. I met with a VP of a pretty large company in the energy sector. He saw me speak and then we set up for coffee, “I listened to a lot of your podcast and this is the journey that’s happening to me. I feel like I know you already.” That was an incredible experience that opened us up to connect at a much deeper level immediately because he was able to listen to some of the podcasts and read some of the content that I’ve created, listen to some of the podcasts I’ve created. Immediately, we had a relationship and the value of that was amazing.

I attended Ernest’s PodSummit. It was so amazing because within less than five hours, I had a whole game plan of how I was going to do my podcast. I had tips and techniques. I knew what equipment I needed to buy. I had all the best practices. To me, just attending it, hearing from all the different speakers you’ve had, it gave me the confidence because weeks later to the date of attending, I launched my podcast, which was amazing when I first launched it. It was trending on iTunes. It’s amazing how the power of the value that you brought to that summit. I want to make sure that you talk about this summit because Go-Getters, if you want to start your podcast or if you have a podcast and you want to take it to the next level, I hope to meet you at the next summit. Tell us a little bit about the summit. Why did you start it in the first place? What are you planning on doing?

PodSummit was a project to see if I could put together event, put together a conference. I’ve never put together a conference before. Would anybody show up? Would anybody buy tickets? Would I be able to put together something that was really good? That was a test and so I put a lot of work into finding the right speakers, into arranging it. We had videos and short sessions and long sessions and campfire chats. I jammed a lot of stuff into this conference because I’ve been to a lot of conferences, I’ve spoken to a lot of conference. I wanted to build something that I would want to go to. That was the first thing.

The second thing was, I wanted to build something where I wanted to learn the things to make me better. How to interview people? What does a good show sound like? How would you edit? It sounds interesting. How would you monetize? How would you promote it? Those are the questions that I had. Out of that came the first PodSummit, which went well. We had 110 people from all over North America, which was amazing and it wasn’t what I was expecting at the time and so that just blew my mind. I got emotional there at the end when we’re wrapping it up and I was saying that this might be the one and only PodSummit ever. I want to say thanks to everyone for coming. The feedback that we got as a result of that, we had sponsors and they were like, “You can’t say that, Ernest. Just shut up and tell them it’s going to happen again next year.”

I made the decision to run it again. It’s happening in Edmonton, Alberta. The colder of the two cities, Alberta. With the space that we’re going to is a radio station performance space. We have 100 people in total. I have speakers coming in from the UK, the US, and all over a few places in Canada and it’s going to be fantastic. It’s the same thing as we did last time and we’re now leveling it up essentially. We want to squeeze a few more topics in. One of the pieces of feedback that I got from the last conference was that people didn’t have enough time to network because I jammed everything. It was like session, session, session, break for five minutes and then session, session, session, lunch, lead for 30 minutes and then session, session, session. Then we’re done. We have people that have now built podcast networks, people that have ran podcast for a while, they’ve used them to build their business. We have expanded the topics a little bit. The last one was more around journalism and professional type of podcasts. I’ve come to the understanding that that’s only a small portion of the whole podcasting world. There’s like reality TV podcast. There’s sci-fi podcast, horror podcast, beer podcasts. My world was very small within the overall world of podcasting. Now opening up a little bit. We’ll hear on monetization, for example, from one of the biggest Dr. Who podcasts in the world who happens to be ran out of Edmonton.

We’ll hear from someone who runs an entrepreneurship podcasts and other person who built a podcast network. We’ll hear a lot of different aspects of monetization. We will talk to Mike Russell, who’s coming from the UK. He’s done production for radio and podcasts all over the world. He’s either going through or speaking at VidCon and he was speaking at the social media conference in the US, so I’m super excited. It’s going to be a great time.

Anything else you want to mention about the summit. This is your second time, second go around. Do you think you’ll do a third one?

I don’t know. Here’s the thing that I’ve learned, and this is coming from the podcast for the PodSummit as well. Every single person that I talked to said to do it again. Every single person that has run events before, they said they just get bigger and better every year that you run it. There’s that idea about consistency and what I’ve learned about myself is that I like to start things and so one of the things that’s probably going to be happening is that I’m going to be entering into a partnership with someone to help me run this. Just to give people a bit of a background of this. The first one, I bankrolled entirely myself. Everything that we paid for went on my credit card. The entire risk was on me. This time, it’s the same kind of an idea.

All the speakers, flights, everything that I have to pay for the AV and everything else, it’s coming from me because it’s something that I wanted to make into success and so I was willing to assume all the risk. That also takes a lot of time and effort to build something like this. I’m going to be partnering up with someone to help me out a little bit and so I can keep on innovating and building new things. It’s where my natural inclination is.

Just set up the business model and make sure we have other folks, making sure people can keep the lights running. Hopefully, I get a chance to see you there again. Your wife, she did a presentation with the Brain Gymat the summit. Since that time, I still use that, and I’ve brought that to my team. You got to tell her that Brain Gym is amazing. For Go-Getters that are like, “What is she talking about?” Do you want to mention what Brain Gym is about?

State Of Podcasting: 100 would be great, but one right person, that was totally worth it.

My wife works for a company called West Jet, which is an airline company in Canada, one of the two major ones. One of the things that they do with their executive team, this is like the VPs, Directors, Executive VPs and all the staff, they do this thing called Brain Gym. It’s a little bit ridiculous. Pre-schoolers do this and kindergarteners do this. That’s where this comes from and the whole idea is to sync up the two halves of your brain, so that you’re better able to think, process information and remember things. It’s three or four different moves that you do as part of this and that gets you into a learning mode. I’ve done that at conferences I’ve spoken at after she showed me how to do that with their executive team. I spoke at a conference being 500 people. I get everybody to get up and do this weird dance and touching and all this kind of stuff. The great thing about it is there’s a couple of things. One is it does help your brain work better and the second thing is it gets people up and moving because I find with the conference, we sit a lot. It can be draining. It can be tiring. Doing the Brain Gym is one of my favorite things to do. It helps you connect with other people too, because you’re having fun. There’s a YouTube video so they can see all the moves.

If people want to connect with you outside of the summit, share some links, some ways people can reach out to you.

You can find me at ErnestBarbaric.com. That website is going through an overhaul and hopefully you’ll see more of a focus on meaningful work, more of a focus on executive coaching rather than marketing and on Twitter, I’m @Ebarbaric. If you want to check out the podcast that I’ve been producing, it’s called the The Art of Meaningful Work and you can find that on iTunes and Overcast.

Thank you, Ernest. This is so full circle. Pleasure having you on the show.

I’m a digital marketer, educator, and speaker. For the last decade I helped businesses navigate the rapidly changing landscape of modern marketing.

I designed digital marketing certificate programs at University of Calgary, Mount Royal University, and Canadian Marketing Association. By now, about 2500 professionals have gone through these courses.